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Asylum papers in hand, Raz Mohammad Aryubi recalled his arrival in Austria from his native Afghanistan in spring 2014, and how, at 21, he is now studying for an M.B.A. at the University of Vienna. But his feeling of security in the country he wishes to make his home evaporated, he said, when he saw what happened in Paris.

A growing number of politicians in the United States have used last Friday's terrorist attacks in France to argue for tighter restrictions, if not an outright halt, on accepting Syrian refugees. But in France itself, the government is keeping its doors open.

The European Union was closing in on a deal Wednesday to return more migrants to Africa, but there was skepticism that the plan would meet the goal of reducing the numbers of refugees arriving in Germany, Scandinavia and other destinations.

Somewhere right now, in a refugee camp in Amman or a rental apartment in Beirut or on a street in Istanbul, sits a Syrian hoping to be among the 25,000 people resettled to Canada, possibly by the end of the year. United Nations staff working with the Canadian government to figure out who will be on the planes or ships dispatched to the region in the coming weeks say they are trying to keep expectations realistic.

Britain is to spend almost half a billion pounds to stem the flow of migrants across the Mediterranean. Ministers will announce £275 million of funding today to help Turkish officials deal with hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees over the next two years, as a two-day global summit on the crisis closes in Malta. At a working dinner in Valletta last night, David Cameron also pledged to use £200 million of British aid money to help African countries tackle migration.

David Cameron is to insist that EU migrants working in Britain are banned from claiming in-work benefits for four years as part of the UK’s new relationship with Brussels. The prime minister said he still wanted the controversial reform to be part of Britain’s new relationship with the EU, despite major difficulties in securing the move.

Sweden will impose temporary border controls from Thursday in response to a record influx of refugees, a turnaround for a country known for its open-door policies that also threw down the gauntlet to other EU nations hit by a migration crisis. The decision by a Nordic state that touts itself as a “humanitarian superpower” underscored how the flow of refugees into the European Union is straining its prized system of open internal borders close to breaking point.